If you’re not up on your acronyms, DNS is short for domain name system: Think of it like the contacts list of the internet, a way to get crucial information your computer needs to load a website. A distributed denial of service attack is essentially hosing a website with so much spam that it can’t keep up. This attack is making it impossible for Dyn to do its job, making it impossible for your computer to access sites because the data to do so simply isn’t there.

The size of these DDoS attacks has increased so much lately thanks largely to the broad availability of tools for compromising and leveraging the collective firepower of so-called Internet of Things devices — poorly secured Internet-based security cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs) and Internet routers. Last month, a hacker by the name of Anna_Senpai released the source code for Mirai, a crime machine that enslaves IoT devices for use in large DDoS attacks. The 620 Gbps attack that hit my site last month was launched by a botnet built on Mirai, for example.